Gertrude Atherton Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.

Gertrude Atherton
Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!

Gertrude Atherton
Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others — in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance — they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

Gertrude Atherton
California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.

Gertrude Atherton
The sudden nostalgia was as much of the body as of the spirit. Her very veins seemed full of tears.

Gertrude Atherton
The 'creative faculty'... was lethargic; it sometimes roused itself to spurts and flashes during wakeful nights, but slept like a boa-constrictor that had swallowed a pig when he tried to invoke it.

Gertrude Atherton
We never care to know new people unless we are sure we shall like them.

Gertrude Atherton
I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.

Gertrude Atherton
Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.

Gertrude Atherton
Books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive.

Gertrude Atherton
Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.

Gertrude Atherton
The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.

Gertrude Atherton
Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.

Gertrude Atherton
In times of panic man seems to exchange his soul for a tail.

Gertrude Atherton
When the horrors that men and women make for themselves come into my mind, I go out and look at the solitary peak that towers above the long receding range of mountains at the head of the lake.

Gertrude Atherton
Rachel's imagination had never worked toward the fact that money could roll down hill and not roll up again.

Gertrude Atherton
The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.

Gertrude Atherton